I'd like to describe my grandfather, Ông Nội, who's seventy-six and lives with us in Can Tho, in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. People are often surprised that the most open-minded person in our family is also the oldest.
I've lived with him my whole life, so I've seen this many times. He was a rice farmer for most of his life and only finished primary school, but he's endlessly interested in other people's ideas.
The clearest example happened when my older sister told the family she wanted to marry a man from Germany she'd met while studying in Ho Chi Minh City. Some relatives were very unhappy, mainly because of language and culture. My grandfather was the first to invite him to dinner. He asked him dozens of questions about German farming, how they celebrate festivals, and what his parents did. By the end of the evening, they were comparing farming tools using drawings on a napkin. He's also very open about new technology. At seventy, he asked me to teach him to use video calls, and now he watches cooking videos from all over the world and tries to copy them, with mixed results.
His open-mindedness has really affected me. I used to be quite quick to judge people who were different. Watching him, I've learned that curiosity is much more useful than suspicion. When I started at university, I joined an exchange club and made friends from Thailand, Japan and France, which I don't think I'd have done without his example. He once told me that if you only listen to people who agree with you, you'll never learn anything new. I try to live by that.